Lessons I Learned

NGOs, Voluntourism, Cambodia, and Life Lessons

Posts categorized under Development

I don’t. I want to clarify. My piece in Beyond Profit called “Much Ado About Scale” was intended to be anti-scale. If we can scale a quality solution: fabulous! It was intended to encourage other ways of looking at reaching more people with our ideas, rather than just trying to encourage organizations to “scale up” […]

You can read more about each of our programs on the PEPY website, but I thought it might be more important to tell you the WHYs and HOWs of the decisions we make in our program design, rather than just talk about numbers of trainings and books we give out. Our development philosophy is based […]

Or, like so many of these questions which try to put who sectors into a “good or bad” category, does it just depend on a case-by-case basis? This post on Social Edge talks about hybrid organizations and I added the comment below which relates to other thoughts I have posted on my blog about social […]

I recently tried to post a comment in response to this listing on Trip Advisor which encourages visits to orphanages while traveling in Siem Reap. As my comment was not a review of the area, it was not approved, so I am posting it here. — I am writing in response to a post stating […]

vol⋅un⋅teer [vol-uhn-teer] –noun 1. a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking. 2. a person who performs a service willingly and without pay. It would probably make a lot more sense if we stopped using the title “volunteer” for positions where people are getting paid. The result is that I have […]

This is a post I originally put on the PEPY Team Journal. — What is this “sustainability” you speak of? I do not think it means what you think it means. This word is used so often now in development that it seems to have taken on a huge range of meanings. Are we all […]

In a post by my friend Paco, who works for Better World Books, he questions what BWB’s role can be as a social venture working to improve literacy globally. I added some thoughts here as well. http://donniya.blogspot.com/2009/10/books-for-africa-literacy-in-africa-and.html I recently went to the BWB office in South Bend, IN and was SO impressed with the team […]